be aware how quietly and gradually
the lesson of Resignation has been taught you. You would have got into
a terrible state of excitement, if any one had told you then that you
would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time;
and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that in
not many years you would not care a single straw for the things and the
persons who were then uppermost in your mind and heart. What an entirely
new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you!
and how completely the old ones are gone: gone, like the sunsets you
remember in the summers of your childhood; gone, like the primroses that
grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy! Said my friend Smith to
me, a few days ago: "You remember Miss Jones, and all about that? I
met her yesterday, after ten years. She is a fat, middle-aged,
ordinary-looking woman. What a terrific fool I was!" Smith spoke to me
in the confidence of friendship; yet I think he was a little mortified
at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his
former folly. He had got over it completely; and in seeing that he was
(at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his
friends had always been aware. Of course, early interests do not always
die out. You remember Dr. Chalmers, and the ridiculous exhibition about
the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty
years, and long since in her grave. You remember the singular way in
which he signified his remembrance of her, in his famous and honored
age. I don't mean the crying, nor the walking up and down the
garden-walk calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his card:
not his _carte_; you could understand _that_: but his visiting-card
bearing his name, and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers.
Probably it pleased him to do so; and assuredly it did harm to no one
else. And we have all heard of the like things. Early affections are
sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old. But still,
more material interests come in, and the old affection is crowded out
of its old place in the heart. And so those comparatively fanciful
disappointments sit lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun
beats down, and _there_ lies the dusty way. When the cantankerous and
unamiable mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person
at least as respectable as herself, on the ground that the